My Evolving Relationship with The Character of James Bond

I have a long, but oddly complicated relationship with James Bond ever since I laid eyes on the movies when I was very, very young. Obsessive fandom means that I've watched those movies repeatedly, to the point of rapidly and repeatedly watching each new one on its release. As a teenager, I turned to the novels and read those a few times each as well (well, the ones that I liked the most). I even started to read the continuation novels, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (actually one of the best of all the novels, period), carrying on through John Gardener's tenure. But although I've bought every single one, I have to admit that I stopped actually reading the novels sometime during Raymond Benson's run.

I don't think that this was due to some quality issue on his part, but a change in my own tastes. Having said that, I keep buying them on the basis that I'm going to get around to reading them at some point. Although this occasionally holds true of other books I've bought, the chances of it happening for the newer Bond novels are presumably decreasing over time.

Hero is a pretty complicated word. While Ian Fleming undoubtedly did things that were heroic, my personal aversion to a lot of his politics (a feeling that's grown in me as I've grown up) and some of the (not always so casual) racism and misogyny in his writing have meant that the biography of him is also unread. Come to think of it, that tome may have well found its way to the charity shop (I checked - it hasn't, but it will).

The James Bond of the novels is also often difficult to describe as heroic. Is he a hero? Well, yes. And although he's probably not quite an anti-hero, his own snobbery, racism & misogyny (his role as Ian Fleming's alter ego is pretty well understood) make it difficult to root for him unequivocally. In some ways that makes him a perfect contemporary hero - people are complicated after all and nuanced writing through history tells us that good people sometimes do bad and bad people sometimes do good. Furthermore, heroism is sometimes a little more meaningful when achieved despite personal failings. In some ways however, this possibly makes him unadaptable to the screen in his purest form; screen heroes can be flawed, but movies tend to insist that they have some kind of inherent likeability or a similar sympathetic quality. Accurately depicting a 'hero' on screen who enjoys a sexual encounter tinged "with the sweet tang of rape" is beyond the pale and rightly so.

Maybe just for this reason, screen depictions have veered away from too pure a portrayal of Fleming's Bond (some Moore than others, of course) and given us various versions of a hero who's much easier to root for - predilections for alcohol and casual sex aren't really the worst things in the world. So my faith in the screen Bond as opposed to the literary one has been much easier to maintain as I've grown older (I nearly said 'grown up' but let's not go crazy). I still anticipate new Bond movies with the same fervour that I did decades ago and love movies that I loved years ago with undimmed intensity.

Fandom's a complicated thing and something I'm thinking of writing a lot more about as there are so many facets to it. Many people who are fans of something get a huge amount of pleasure from their fandom. But we shouldn't let blind devotion stop our fandom from evolving. After all, relationships begin, evolve, grow and sometimes end, so why wouldn't our fandom? I think it's safe to say that I've fallen out of love somewhat with the literary James Bond, but I think of him with the same warmth I might have for an ex-boyfriend. And that's not a bad thing.

Why I Love: Listening to Other People Talking About Movies

From long before I was born, film magazines were the only medium where audiences could find out about and engage in conversations about movies. During my own infatuation with movies, I've bought more magazines than I can count, including issue one of Empire (still going, of course) which had a really well-researched article on Bond title songs. I carried on buying Empire until I felt I'd outgrown it, getting rid of all my back issues when I stopped, except for the first five (nostalgia wouldn't let me). At various times, I also bought Sight & Sound (which is also still going), Neon, Cinescape, SFX, Cinefex (the US special effects quarterly), Deathray, 007, Premiere, Starlog, Starburst & Cinefantastique, while I'm still buying MI6.

I loved movies and movie magazines so much in fact that I even wrote for one after university. It may not have been the most impressive magazine; the look resulted from the editor's PC only having three fonts and without professional sub-editing, the editor was able to indulge design whims leading to things like unbroken, solid pages of text. But Movie Collector still has a special place in my heart as a magazine for people who genuinely loved movies.

The proliferation of media and the cost of paper have led to a slow decline of film magazines in print, which has had an impact in terms of numbers, quality of output and circulation. The ubiquitous internet has of course started to provide a lot of things we used to get from film magazines for free (or thereabouts, depending on how you look at it). There is of course an argument that the quality of what we get on the internet doesn't necessarily rival what we paid for in print, even if it is more timely. And although there may be occasions where this is merited, it should also be observed that internet clickbait (overhyped trivia designed to draw hits for advertising money) is matched by self-generated content of similar quality in print - I'm thinking particularly of articles listing 10 of the greatest car chases or the 10 greatest horror movies, which don't really give the reader anything new.

This kind of dull, generic content, whatever the medium, is the opposite of unique, engaged writing and surely the enemy of good film journalism of whatever flavour you're after. And its effect has been compounded by the break-up of film journalism into more niche areas. Movie magazines always used to deal in stars, fashion and glamour, but that's since been largely hived off into celebrity news and gossip. I have to admit to getting engaged by this until literally one day, I realised that I didn't care about most peoples' personal lives and just stopped. I also stopped years of reading Variety and The Hollywood Reporter when I realised that I wasn't genuinely that interested in the movie business as such (I used to believe that it gave me insight into what movies got made - which it did, but again, I just didn't care that much about that particular aspect). I stopped reading Cinefex when I realised that practical effects were becoming used less and less and the ingenuity that went into them was being replaced by a different kind of ingenuity (better and better CG) that I was just indifferent to.

I'm personally only interested in the final product - the actual movie. And hence I'm interested in interviews where filmmakers of whatever specific profession are able to talk about their intentions (not those awful press-junket write-ups), well-written reviews with properly articulated opinions (whether deciding on what to watch or - more often - after the movie to see if others' thoughts stimulate my own feelings in any way), other bits and pieces of critical thinking and sometimes just silly fan stuff.

Nowadays, my film journalism and commentary comes from The Playlist blog as well as Vulture, while I'm also catching up on several years of the James Bond Radio podcast, in addition to listening to directors interviewing directors as part of the Directors' Guild of America podcast. Although I've talked predominantly about film magazines, it's taken me a long time to realise that what I valued wasn't the magazines themselves (hence why they're not mentioned in the title of this post) but what I was getting from them; the reason I love reading other people writing about their love for movies is that it constantly rekindles the joy that I get myself from them. The passion and the voice are mandatory; anything less just passes the time.

Reboots, Reimaginings, Live Action Adaptations & Sequels

Back in the 80s, Film Twitter (notwithstanding Twitter's lack of existence) used to bemoan the infantilisation of movies. After all, the 70s had given us the first two Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and those were just the work of one director. The 80s gave us, well, Mac & Me. I'm being facetious, of course - the 80s also has some absolutely terrific cinema. In the 90s however, the then equivalent of Film Twitter started to bemoan the preponderance of TV adaptations, some of which have probably sunk back into the ether; The Fugitive, The Flintstones, Maverick, Mission: Impossible & The Brady Bunch Movie are just a few off the top of my head.

Since then, everyone's noticed that reboots and sequels seem to be making up an increasing proportion of new movies released every year. Last year saw the introduction of the third iteration of Spider-Man in less than a decade. While Indiana Jones and Die Hard have been sequelised to the point that new instalments are being dreaded rather than anticipated. Some series are going strong: James Bond - I know, I would say that; Mission: Impossible - although its financial success is unarguable, I've personally found the last couple of movies pretty creatively bereft. Others seem to keep going until audience fatigue kicks in (yup, Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you). And this trend has been crossed with the rise of the comic book movie - these may tail off at some point, but there seems to be no sign of it happening soon.

What studios tend to refer to as new IP (intellectual property - the foundation for a movie, which used to be a script, a novel, a memoir, but can now be a game, a previous movie or even a theme park ride) has become rarer and rarer. Studios have also shown an increased preference for a movie slate (the year's offerings) consisting of a smaller number of would-be blockbusters than the wider, more varied blend of old, leading to many of the studios actually shutting down their specialist/ semi-independent divisions. Meanwhile, huge increases in global audiences and screen counts mean that China is expected to become the largest single movie market in the world at some point in the next three years and the 'rest of the world' is regarded as even more important than the once-dominant US market.

This has led to simpler/ more simplistic movies than we used to see, with less dialogue (e.g. action movies), as these can then play internationally much more easily than films used to. And although in some instances casting has become more diverse (see how the Fast & Furious films have developed over time) other movies have been accused of cultural appropriation (see Ghost in the Shell), whitewashing (er, Ghost in the Shell again) and pandering (see Looper among others).

What does this mean for what we're seeing now and going to be seeing? If you'd asked anyone fifteen years ago what the word 'reboot' meant in a cinematic context or indeed what the words 'sidequel' or 'reimagining' meant at all, you'd have been met with a blank face. If you'd asked anyone about making a live action adaptation of Beauty & The Beast or The Lion King, you would have been told that there's nothing wrong with the animated originals (for the record: there isn't).

If these trends proliferate and we keep rewarding these movies with our money, this situation will just carry on. The creativity we'll see in movies will be restricted to how they're marketed to us, promising us that a reimagining isn't the same as a reboot, that this time will be different and that this time the movie really will satisfy.

A lot of my needs for narrative cinema are already being satisfied by great novels and the Golden Age of Television. And in a year where US summer box office takings are down for the first time in a long time, it seems I'm not the only one. Martin Scorsese's next movie is being funded by and will premiere on Netflix. Francis Ford Coppola has talked about how cinema as a form appears to have migrated to other forms. The only way to get the movies you want is to vote at the box office and/ or on your television. After all, there's no fate but what we make. Choose wisely!

Why I Love: Film Posters

I recently realised - the reason for which will be the subject of a separate post - that the highest form of non-narrative art as far as I'm concerned, is a movie poster. Sure, I've been to various galleries and seen and enjoyed various sculptures and paintings. But movie posters? That hits my spot. And in the same way that my growing up slightly before the web meant that my understanding of media predates the internet revolution a little (something I'm very grateful for), I'm also glad that I grew up with painted movie posters, before the prevalence of photo montages and Photoshop overtook everything else. The reason for this is that there's just something about painted posters that provides a sense of heightened reality or fantasy that a touched up set of photos just can't quite compete with (don't even get me started on so-called motion posters) - although having said that, a side order of childhood nostalgia probably has a part to play as well.

Everyone knows Drew Struzan's fantastic work for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies (among many, many others!) which still looks as great as it did on the movies' original releases, but there are also numerous other well known poster artists who've delivered iconic work. My own Bond fandom means that Bond posters are, of course, my absolute favourites and I recently found that a huge chunk of my favourite posters were all designed by the same artist: Brian Bysouth.

Bysouth plays an interesting role in Bond history, as apart from images like the poster above, he was also involved in the first photo montage the Bond series ever used (the UK poster for Licence to Kill - a poster I like a lot, although sadly, he doesn't) while his last contribution to the series was the main UK poster for The World is Not Enough, which is probably one of the better efforts from that particular period. Bond posters have a history of committing to giving the audience a rollicking ride with action & excitement coming out of your ears and despite differences in individual movies and posters, for the most part, I'd argue both that that's what you get and that the side order of unnaturally forced perspective is just a bonus.

Nowadays, the proliferation of media means that we all have a strong sense of whether or not we're interested in seeing a movie long before we see the poster. All the poster tends to do is confirm what we're thinking, increase a movie's awareness with an arresting image or - very rarely - make us think again (sometimes in favour, sometimes against?!). But back in the olden/ golden days, posters were sometimes one of the few ways we could find out about a movie and what might possibly be in store.

I have a strong preference for narrative art (movies, novels, music) over other forms. And it only recently occurred to me that many movies never quite deliver against what the poster suggests. So despite these issues, why do I love static movie posters so much? Ultimately, any great poster is a promise. And even if the film subsequently lets its audience down, who doesn't enjoy the excitement of the possibilities?

mother!

The past few years at the cinema haven't been overly kind to me. Years where I regularly went to see somewhere between 100 and 150 films a year at the cinema seem to be quite a long time ago. Some of that is undoubtedly down to how I've changed with age; I'm not as willing as I used to be to risk a couple of hours of my time and/ or £10 just on the possibility that I might like something that has little or no obvious appeal to me (I say this as someone who walked out half an hour into a screening of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' when I realised that there really was nothing of interest to someone on their own aged more than 10). But I'm pretty sure the movie industry has changed quite a lot over the last few years too. Truly independent movies appear to have largely disappeared from the cinema circuit and we're now reliant on services like Netflix for anything remotely non-mainstream, which may indeed be (as Christopher Nolan has suggested) the canary in the coalmine predicting the death of the cinema experience.

I was fairly indifferent to 'mother!' when I saw it; there were a lot of things I liked, but equally I found much of the experience beyond the limits of my interests. Even before I'd read interviews with the director, Darren Aronofsky, it was pretty obvious that the movie was designed to be loved or hated and my indifference wasn't meant as some kind of bloody-minded superiority. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the studio behind the movie has leant into the divisiveness that's met it's release, even if I am somewhat suspicious of their motives (a studio publicly supporting a film with major stars and an important director? Clearly not the latest Uwe Boll release). Having said that, the thing I was most pleased about when I went to see it was, as per Paramount's publicity, that the movie exists at all. I'm just as bored by-the-numbers wannabe blockbusters as anyone else. Everyone's tastes change over the years and mine are no exception. Nowadays I have less interest in spectacle and more in characterisation and strong narratives than I used to and more and more I'm finding that that itch is getting scratched on my TV much more than on my still weekly cinema trips. So seeing movies with ambition and ideas in their heads at the cinema is still a bit of a thrill. Even if I'm not mad about the actual movie itself.

The Book's Always Better Than The Movie. Really?

A few weeks ago, I finished Jonathan Safran Foer's novel 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' which I rushed in order to ensure I completed it before the movie came out to ensure that the experiences didn't weirdly overlap. There are plenty of novels I've read after watching the movie and it's been no big deal, but I tend to prefer reading the novel first in order to avoid visualising the cast as the characters. As an aside I loved the novel, although I suspect it's not everyone's cup of tea, as well as quite liking the movie, even though it's far from the director's best (that would be 'The Hours' by a long shot). The whole experience got me to thinking how annoying I find it when I hear people complaining "the book's better than the movie" and not just because they probably mean that "the novel's better than the movie". As a further digression, a former English teacher of mine is now very happy as a resulting of me making that point. Or just not turning in his grave. Or possibly dribbling in a home somewhere and not caring either way. People confusing the book ("the physical form") and the art ("the novel") drove him spare. In fact, do you think he saw ebooks coming? Damn, that was one clever bloke. Anyway.

The obvious flaw in the comparison is of course how much it disrespects the process of adaptation as well as being deeply unfair thanks to basic differences in form. Characters' inner monologues? Not so easy to put on screen (although the recent adaptation of 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' did a fabulous job thanks to Tilda Swinton's astonishing performance). Carl Sagan's 'Contact' (which I read after I'd seen the movie) lost the crux of the personal story, which came to fruition in the last few pages and which I'm not going to spoil here, as the entire sub-plot had been excised from the movie. And yet when I thought back to the movie, I could see that there was no way to ladle it in, that the excision was entirely sensible and just what a good adaptation job had been done. The novel of 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was a densely textured, earthy, philosophical masterpiece. Martin Scorsese's movie was no less earthy and indeed no less philosophical, but the tonality & intricacy of the prose just couldn't be translated. Did the movie feel as though it was lacking anything? Not so much.

'We Need To Talk About Kevin' was a good example of one of the fundamental rules of adaptation: not being overly faithful to any particular literary conceit if it acts as too much of a constraint on the movie. In that case, the film dumped the Choderlos de Laclos-style series of letters/ interior ruminations for something that superficially felt much more conventional and yet with a slight sense of subterfuge managed to include everything that was key with attentive, subtle direction and lovely performances. An almost but not quite opposite example of this was the film of 'One Day' which insisted on keeping the basic format of the same calendar date on successive years; the problem with this was that there was so much story to get through and so little time for character detail that the actually-not-that-bad movie felt like it was hurriedly ticking boxes, rather than say skipping alternate years and giving what remained more room to breathe.

But the comparison between novel & movie is best tested with three particular examples. 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was (imho) one of Dick's weakest novels, adding virtually nothing to his oeuvre. 'Jaws' read like a typical airport blockbuster (does anyone write novels like that any more, because they're not available in any airport I've travelled through recently?) while 'The Godfather' read like lurid pulp trash. (Sonny's manhood was so large that prostitutes used to charge him double, explaining his particular attraction to the woman he ended up with as she had a particular health issue allowing her to, um, accommodate him. No, I'm not making this up; strange how this detail didn't quite make it to the movie.) And yet Ridley Scott's movie invented an entire visual aesthetic as well as forming the basis for modern cyberpunk, Spielberg's movie is still regarded as a masterpiece thriller and Coppola's movie presented a gangster epic in the style of an opera and is still regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. That's the ultimate problem with the idea that the movie's not as good as the novel; it's just not necessarily true.

Digital Cinema Re-Releases

In I think the penultimate chapter of Mark Cousins' otherwise excellent thirteen part documentary 'The Story of Film: An Odyssey', the author became enamoured with the word 'digital' and started liberally applying it pretty much everywhere. And I became really, really confused (surely the opposite of the intended result?). CG effects have really taken off in the last 30 years, but computers themselves have been used in/ for effects for even longer than that. Shooting digitally has only become commonplace in the last five years or so. Laserdiscs and DVDs both date from the 90s. And digital projection has only really been around for the last decade. Unless I'm missing something, the links between many of those actual, individual technologies is tenuous at best - the only common thing I can think of is, um, movies.

Although different aspects of this (as a whole) technological revolution are of course other blog posts, this one - almost, but not quite contradicting what I wrote above - is about a weird result from the confluence between home video and digital projection and that would be blu-ray. A little like the way longstanding TV sets like 'Eastenders' (as opposed to longstanding TV sets such as the one probably in your living room) had to be spruced up for HD owing to the broadcast quality showing up previously undetectable flaws, blu-ray releases have necessitated a lot of film restoration. One of the best examples of this is the canon of 22 Bond movies (yes I know that the producers have obtained the rights to 'Never Say Never Again' and the first film adaptation of 'Casino Royale', but let's be honest: they're always going to be treated like unwanted stepchildren and no, I wasn't looking for an excuse to mention Bond films). Home video sets of the series through the years have sold truckloads in those we-didn't-know-what-to-get-you-for-Christmas-but-you-love-Bond-movies-right?/ another-version?-I-have-to-have-it! kinds of way and the producers and studio make quite a lot from the back catalogue every year as a result. As a result, the advent of blu-ray led to the producers getting the back catalogue restored in very, very high-def (8k for technical geeks) by the outfit formerly known as Lowry Digital. This would ensure not only pristine blu-ray releases, but also awesome, whatever-comes-next releases too, whether that be another disc format, HD home streaming or even-more-'H'D home streaming. I'm leaving the subject of blu-ray transfers for another post, but - awesome side effect alert! - the producers actually ended up with digital prints that weren't just good enough for cinema release, but which probably look a whole lot better than any original release. As a result of this, the producers were able to do a limited series of cinema re-releases for some of the most popular Bond movies.

The Bond folks weren't the only ones who cottoned on to this of course and all kinds of movies are now getting short cinema re-releases. I'm saving the subject of 3D re-releasing for another post, but regular 2D re-releases include 'Jurassic Park', 'John Carpenter's The Thing', 'Ghostbusters', 'Back To The Future' (which was strangely UK-only) & 'Scarface'. I came thisclose to leaving 'Blade Runner' off the list, since it was the newly minted Ultimate Edition rather than the original theatrical cut, but since Ridley Scott was merely finishing it off rather than fundamentally changing it, it would be wrong to omit it.

So what did I learn apart from reiterating that the experience of watching in a film in a movie theatre (annoying patrons aside) really is nothing like watching it at home, no matter how good your home cinema set-up is? 'Scarface' is not actually a brilliant movie, but is still rollicking good entertainment. 'The Thing' is ruddy terrifying; you'd think a large screen and cleaned up picture might expose weaknesses in Rob Bottin's creature designs, but this didn't turn out to be the case at all. 'Blade Runner' is even more immersing than watching it at home; if you're lucky enough to have a well-designed auditorium, the opening sequence makes you feel like you're actually floating and you really get how cleverly the physical effects on the cityscape were designed to sell you that illusion and this film doesn't let up at all - it's just sheer genius throughout. 'Jurassic Park' hasn't aged well at all; while I loved the film on its original release and watched the video over and over again, seeing at the cinema with the benefit of age (but maybe not so much wisdom) made it feel like a series of not-that-well-strung-together set pieces and ultimately rather hollow.

'Back To The Future' and 'The Lion King' however - which we chose to watch in 2D - were particularly poignant. I was distracted by a slight, continuous noise during the wildebeest stampede in the latter, which of course ends up Simba's realisation that Mufasa has died; I'd figured that maybe one of the speakers was distorting from all the bass. Just as he crawls under his dad's paw, in absolute silence, the noise suddenly amplified into a now clearly identifiable child's wailing, who then screamed "Mummy! Make it stop!". It was simultaneously funny and incredibly moving, as I realised that in twenty or thirty years time that child would talk about this as a seminal moment, the same way people of my generation talk about feeling devastated when Bambi's mum got shot and that I'd been there to witness it; a seventeen year old movie reducing a new generation to tears. Although I cried plenty of times myself, but don't tell anyone.

'Back To The Future' was just as fun, albeit a slightly different experience. The movie itself hasn't dated a jot. It's just as endlessly quotable as ever. The actors all just get it and do their utmost to invest everything in their characters, all of whom are perfectly realised. The direction never flags, the script is just a sheer joy. The score felt vibrant and the whole film just came alive. The cinema was also full of families, which is something I usually dread thanks to parents who often don't give a monkey's what their kids are doing or what disruption they're wreaking on anyone else. And they were all absolutely silent. Not a peep. And I realised that when the movie really is that good - admittedly a rarity - that audiences will of course behave themselves. Two things occurred to me: the first was how cool it had been to watch the movie with other people who'd grown up with it and who were now presumably recreating that experience with their own children. The second was about the movie itself. 'Back To The Future' was of course made for family audiences, but it has charm, characters and edge. Would anyone make a movie with the line "Great Scott! The Libyans!" now? I don't think so. Would anyone make a film now where the (er) teenage hero's best friend is the crazy, old, single guy who lives as a recluse on the other side of town? That would be 'no'. Is anyone going to talk with reverence and love for any of the Transformers movies in quarter of a century's time the way that people like me can talk about 'Back To The Future' now (yes, it'll be twenty-seven this year). That would also be 'no'. I shouldn't pick on Transformers movies (the problem is that it's just too much fun) and I actually don't have to: there's plenty of vacuous, utterly disposable entertainment out there. Pick a big, recent popcorn movie or series (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean) and ask yourselves if anyone's going to love them in twenty-five years. Is anyone actually going to remember them in twenty-five years? Just because something's made for a mainstream audience or a family audience doesn't mean that it can skimp on fun, exuberance, entertainment value, great characterisation or any of the other hallmarks of great movies. The second thing I learnt from seeing 'Back To The Future' at the cinema was that the greatest gift of digital cinema re-releases is that we can find those qualities in mainstream films at the cinema again, albeit in movies that we already know and love.